Proper ranks

[Silentwings]

My best idea to solve this is have autohosts only allow people onto them after they have maybe 1-3 hours ingame time (or something like that) AND have a singleplayer mode where people who've just created a new account can make up a few hours in tutorials/missions before trying online play.

The only major obstacle to this is that springlobby at the moment doesn't support missions and (afaik) doesn't give you ingame time from singleplayer mode.

(I have ~35 tutorial/campaign/skirmish missions already for BA/BAR. I was planning not to release them until BAR was released but since that will still be a while it might make sense to (partially?) release them for BA.)

[very_bad_soldier]

The community does not deserve to survive when it is not even willing to play with newbies.
I dont think it is fair to expect from newbs to play several hours in a sandbox or even spectate before we allow them to join our "real" games.

Also in 8v8BADSD (which make like 90% of the played games) newbies are not even a problem I think. With 16 players there is enough room for the autobalance system to even a newbie out.
Funnily I saw several times on TERA stuff like "omg omg a newbie. Lets kick him he ruins our game!!!". Then they kick him and another player takes the base. Then the game is over withing 15 minutes because that kick completely screwed balance. Players seem to not really understand autobalancing.

Small games like 3vs3 are another story. Its really hard to make a reasonable balance when there is one newbie. But we see those games rarely anway.

[SirMaverick]

Ack @ very_bad_soldier

[smoth]

I agree with vbs noobs have to gef a chance to learn!

[Silentwings]

The rank limit which is on some autohosts is put there to combat smurfing, not to deny newbies entry. Although some players may be unfriendly to newbies, (in BA, at least) autohost owners are not.

I don't think it's unreasonable to ask a newbie to play an hour of single player/tutorial/campaign before 'unlocking' online play, but I agree that this is debatable, so....

Idea: Right now there is an active admin network on TERA (don't know about other hosts). We could allow all ranks and deal with smurfing via noticing chranks. But I think then it makes sense to actually punish smurfing i.e. few hours ban or suchlike.

In my opinion an equally bad thing is ZK lobby deliberately hiding other mods from newbies.

[very_bad_soldier]

The rank limit which is on some autohosts is put there to combat smurfing, not to deny newbies entry. Although some players may be unfriendly to newbies, (in BA, at least) autohost owners are not.

Sorry to say, but at least TERA admins actively take part in kicking newbies. Also they do tolerate it when other players abuse and kick newbies. I really saw it many times.
And also no, after some chats with the TERA admins I can say they do not welcome newbies on their servers. Its their server and their rules tho.

Idea: Right now there is an active admin network on TERA (don't know about other hosts). We could allow all ranks and deal with smurfing via noticing chranks. But I think then it makes sense to actually punish smurfing i.e. few hours ban or suchlike.

Admin network? Again sorry but in my experience the administration is not very active. There are insults of players and newbies, kicks of newbies, smurfing etc.
Admins do rarely intervene. You actually have to poke an admin to do something. The usual reaction from the admin network is "ask Paste, I dont take part in that". Paste and also Bluestone are actually willing to do something when asked tho (at least when it comes to putting a chrank in place).

May I ask by which nick you usually play BA? I wonder how come that my personal experience does differ so much from yours?
Since it does differ so much I think it would be unfair to discuss that TERA topic any further over the top of their heads. I would appreciate it if the TERA admins themselfs would share their perspective on that tho.

[Silentwings]

Oh I assumed you know, it's no secret I'm Sapphire/Bluestone (my original name on lobby, years ago, was silent_wings).

The autohost rules on http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?p=519280 make it pretty clear that newbies should be treated well and that admins (I'm one) can punish players who do otherwise.

If there are admins kicking newbies without cause then please give us the chatlogs.

I'm not claiming we're all saints but I've only rarely seen TERA admins treat newbs badly, although I have seen it for a very small number of newbies who just refused to listen to the advice of specs/team/etc. There are a some regular players who are very unfriendly to newbs and that is much more common to see. It's true admins don't usually punish people for insulting newbs but it is something I plan to do more of

The majority of the big 8v8 evening games will have at least one person in with admin rights, even if its someone who only uses their admin powers very rarely. In the (EU) daytime I don't usually play spring so I've no idea then.

[very_bad_soldier]

If there are admins kicking newbies without cause then please give us the chatlogs.

Does not help, tried it already. As stated above the usual reaction is "not my business, ask Paste" or "omg it was a newbie who ruined the game".

It is probably just a coincident that since years all you get when typing "!admins" on the TERA host is a list of account IDs? So you dont have a chance to even find out easily who the admins are.

Anyway, your server, your rules. I guess I dont have any rights to interfere there. But imo if you are really trying to have an active moderation then it is working very badly at the moment cause admins just dont care.

[Silentwings]

If you want to know who the admins are, it is made public on the (slightly out of date) forum post with the TERA host rules: http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?p=519280

I suspect that it is a coincidence (obscure spads setting idk?) that it only spews account ids when you ask the host, since there isn't any intention to keep admin names a secret.

Afaik Paste is the only person with the ability to remove/give admin rights, so if you need to complain about an admins behaviour, Paste *is* the right person to talk too.

[very_bad_soldier]

If you want to know who the admins are, it is made public on the (slightly out of date) forum post with the TERA host rules: http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?p=519280

I suspect that it is a coincidence (obscure spads setting idk?) that it only spews account ids when you ask the host, since there isn't any intention to keep admin names a secret.

Problem is that like (my guess) 90% of the players never visit the forums. Even if they do they have to know that there is that (obscure ) TERA thread even in existence.
Fixing that !admin-command by that admin network would have been a doable thing in the past several months, no?

Afaik Paste is the only person with the ability to remove/give admin rights, so if you need to complain about an admins behaviour, Paste *is* the right person to talk too.

The thing is that I was not talking about giving/removing admin rights but usual administration topics

But yeah, nothing more I could say, we wont find an agreement here. If in your opinion the admin-network is working just fine and smurfing is not even a problem anymore nowadays then we just have different opinions Im afraid.

[Silentwings]

Well - we can at least agree that having active admins is a good thing.

But now that I'm an admin on TERA, ofc it appear to work for me because when I'm around there is an admin around... so I am taking what you say seriously.

[Jazcash]

Meh, TERA autohosts and the majority of its operators are just a joke. They don't even have many maps, just the same collection that everybody's played 100 times over. The only reason people use them is because they're DSD 90% of the time and bitches love DSD.

[klapmongool]

Meh, TERA autohosts and the majority of its operators are just a joke. They don't even have many maps, just the same collection that everybody's played 100 times over. The only reason people use them is because they're DSD 90% of the time and bitches love DSD.

[dansan]

Unfortunately I share all of vbs experiences on TERA servers. If I can avoid it, I don't connect to them. In my exp. players and admins seem to have a high tolerance for condescending behavior (it does fluctuate though).

When vbs, zorro, fabricefabs and tzaeru were actively promoting and enforcing(!) respectful behavior on their servers BA was more fun, because there was less time lost to negative emotions and it had a stronger community feeling.

----

But back to smurfs: IMO we need a global smurf-db, because unfortunately jerks are educated to react only to punishment. The (b)kick of a smurf account is no punishment. The necessary reaction is IMO an educational one: perma-ban (delete?) all smurf accounts, and temp-ban the main account for 2 days - on all servers!

Sounds harsh? May produce a conflict with autohost-owners?
I thought it's about saving your loved game from being killed - so what?

----

PS: I wonder if this topic does not need a forum split. It seems to be more about BA than other games.
I also wonder how Zero-K handles those problems. I think they have a closed admin-group (really only 1 autohost with multiple instances). And they have the thing about "unlocking features" that keeps smurfs at bay I guess. What about the [newbie] friendliness? What are your experiences?

[Silentwings]

I've seen ZK having smurf/troll problems, I don't know how agressively they ban. They certainly coordinate across all their hosts.

There were efforts a year ago to coordinate banlists/chrank lists across autohosts - iirc TERA and ACE were both happy to do this and it was other autohosts that wouldn't. Imo the only way to deal with smurfs is to have active admins, I don't think any automated system will catch them all or be able to spot people who just need >1 account.

What we need more is for vbs to pass his code to bibim and get trueskill integrated to spads.

I thought it's about saving your loved game from being killed - so what?

Player numbers have been stable for about a year - imo opinion its about improving the game.

[knorke]

I also wonder how Zero-K handles those problems.

imo zK has the same problems, for example there is the same smurf discussions:
http://zero-k.info/Forum/Thread/2373
http://zero-k.info/Forum/Thread/444
http://zero-k.info/Forum/Thread/3853
http://zero-k.info/Forum/Thread/3837
http://zero-k.info/Battles/Detail/124303
and about how balancing in teamgames is not fair etc, blabla.
Also old players shouting at newbies, selfdestructing in rage, trolling etc. (cba to c&p links)
I wouldnt say it is unbearable but unlocks do not seem to have much impact.

There is seperation to "newbies welcome" and "experienced players" room but usually everybody piles into one room, so that is one commonly mentioned solution that in practice does not work.


I think all those problems are just sympthons of having no playerlimit and thus too big games for an RTS to work.
But in both BA and zK admins are afraid to enforce smaller games in fear of losing players. Idk if their fear is justified but it still is disappointing.

Being "pro" means picking on the enemy newbies in 8v8.
If the newbies in your team get kill in the same way than it was "bad balance."
Easy to see why this is can create a hostile athmosphere.

[Silentwings]

I'm not sure who you mean by 'BA admins' Certainly no one enforces smaller games, although I think its also because many people don't want to play smaller games.

It's not true to say there are no small games. You can see from the replay site that (this morning, at least) there were as many 'small' games as 'big' games. Of course, the big games have more players and tend to last longer.

[knorke]

I'm not sure who you mean by 'BA admins'

BA admins as in the guys managing the autohosts like tera, loet, spads or whatstheirname.

It's not true to say there are no small games. You can see from the replay site that (this morning, at least) there were as many 'small' games as 'big' games.

Yes, if i would not know this i would have stopped playing spring already
Though if you look closer the 1v1 games this morning were all by vbs or flopflop (or both)
That seems to be how it mostly goes, some old player having a streak of some dozen games and after that nothing might happen for the rest of the day.
From a new players perspective these games do not exist, since you basically have to be friends/known with other players.
Tbh I last played BA ~2 years ago but still follow it a bit and that still seems to be the same.

[Silentwings]

I think there are often some newb v newb 1v1s although I haven't looked today and some of those ones will be speedmetal (which is not a bad thing imo). I was meaning the 2v2-6v6 kind of bracket in what I said, but haven't looked at players, they might all be a small number of people too.

Imo the 1v1 community of old timers has little chance of expansion because they aren't making much effort to teach people and they are all too good for average players to want to join in.

[knorke]

I think newb 1v1 on speedmetal or random giant map and such is a bad thing because often it is not by choice. Instead they do know know which map is more fitting and how to set it.
You would generally want new players to play something that represents the game well and I think often that fails.

Unsure about BA but in zK I always seem to play with the same people if there magically happens to be small games.

I see most of newb 1v1 in passworded rooms with both players from same country - to me that looks like two rl friends playing. Such games do not really count towards the number of public games since it might as well be LAN.

Imo the 1v1 community of old timers has little chance of expansion because they aren't making much effort to teach people and they are all too good for average players to want to join in.

If every new player has to be personally coached, that severly limits growth; not really a realistic strategy sadly.